Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
“The tuner was here this morning,” Dominic said. He opened the door and stepped back. “He said it was well-made.”
James went in at something near a run.
He crossed directly to the piano, stopped two feet from it, and stood there with his arms at his sides, taking stock of it. He pressed both palms flat against the cabinet, not lifting the fallboard yet, only feeling the grain of the wood.
He said, “It’s lighter than the one at Fairmont House.”
“Mahogany,” Annabelle said, coming to stand beside him. “It will carry a brighter sound.”
“Can I open it?”
She glanced at Dominic. He was in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, his arms folded. He had not come into the room. His eyes were on James and the piano and not on her.
“May I?” she said quietly.
James straightened. “May I,” he repeated, looking at his uncle.
Dominic said, “It’s for use, James. Not for admiring.”
James took this as permission and lifted the fallboard. He pressed one finger to middle C, listened to it ring out, and lifted it. Pressed it again.
“It doesn’t buzz,” he said. He turned to Annabelle. “The one at Fairmont House buzzed on the third note from the right.”
“I know,” she said.
He ran one finger slowly along the span of the keys without pressing, heel to end and back again.
Annabelle sat beside him on the bench, close enough to guide his hands. Before she placed them, she looked once more toward the doorway.
“James,” she said, “your uncle arranged this for you.”
James turned on the bench and found Dominic with the direct, unhurried gaze he used when a matter required his full attention. “Thank you,” he said. “It is a very good piano. The keys don’t stick.”
Dominic’s hands moved out of his pockets and went back in again. “Good. I was told they wouldn’t.”
James turned back to the keys. “Which one first?” he asked Annabelle.
She set his right hand at middle C and played the four-bar opening of the piece they had been building. James listened with his eyes closed, which meant he was committing it, and she played it again so he had it twice.
The door clicked behind her.
She did not turn. She played the opening again, and James placed his finger at the first note, waiting, and the room was the new music room with the mahogany cabinet and the morning light in from the south window, and whatever Dominic’s footsteps were doing on the other side of that door was not her concern for the next hour.
It was, however, a concern afterward.
Mrs. Howell, intercepted on the way back from the library, mentioned without being directly asked that His Grace had called for his hat and gloves directly after going downstairs, and had gone out.
She had expected this.
That did not make it easier to set aside.
White’s on a Tuesday afternoon was quiet enough that Dominic saw Miles the moment he came through the door, and Miles looked up from the newspaper he was not reading and raised one eyebrow at whatever he found.
“You look like a man who has left a pleasant house to avoid enjoying it,” Miles said. “A very specific kind of misery.”
“I came for a conversation that doesn’t require thinking a dozen exchanges ahead.” Dominic dropped into the chair across from him. “You’ll do.”
“Deeply touched.”
A footman brought wine. Dominic drank, set the glass down, and looked at the fire. Miles let the first five minutes pass without filling them, which was one of the better qualities he possessed.
Then the door opened.
Lucien scanned the room in the two-second way he had, and Dominic was in the east chair, and their eyes met before either of them could arrange around it.
Lucien walked over.
“Keldwick.” A nod. He looked at Dominic, held the look for a measured beat. “Silverford.”
Dominic kept his voice level. “Fairmont. Sit, if you like.”
Lucien sat. He set his hat on the arm of the chair and looked at the fire.
Dominic studied his profile and ran, not for the first time, the mental accounting he’d been running since the morning Lucien had put his fist through Dominic’s cheekbone in his own study.
Lucien had looked at him.
Miles produced conversation easily, as though he did not sense the tension between them: a horse he was thinking of acquiring, a property matter in Wiltshire, a woman of his acquaintance who had behaved remarkably at the Portland dinner.
Lucien contributed to each in the manner of a man raised correctly and defaulting to it under pressure.
Dominic contributed as well. They managed eleven minutes of civil exchange without any of them touching the actual difficulty.
“How… how does she settle?” Lucien said, still without looking at him.
“Well.” Dominic turned his glass in his hand.
“She’s taken to the house, and the house to her.
James has taken to her more efficiently than I managed in three months.
” He paused, chose it. “She’s teaching him daily.
She set up the music room herself, determined the instrument, arranged the lessons.
He’s sleeping better. Eating. He talks more. ”
Lucien said nothing.
“She’s comfortable,” Dominic said. “I wanted you to know that clearly.”
Lucien turned from the fire and looked at him directly, and the look was level and cold. “I know Annabelle is comfortable,” he said. “She would be comfortable in a ruin with the walls coming in. That has never been the concern.”
Dominic’s jaw clenched, but he did not flinch away from them.
Miles said, “I hear the Ashmeres are back. Theodore’s taken the Grosvenor Square house for the season.”
Lucien looked at Miles with the expression of a man recognizing a conversational lifeline and choosing not to take it. He stood. Collected his hat.
“I have somewhere to be.” He looked at Miles. “Keldwick.” He looked at Dominic. The look held two full counts. “Silverford.”
And with that, he left.
Elinor arrived that afternoon with the brisk purpose of a woman who had allotted a specific portion of her day to this visit and intended to use it efficiently.
Newton appeared in the entrance hall before the footman had finished relaying the card, and conducted a thorough inspection of her boots before she was through the door.
James came down the stairs. “Newton knew,” he said. “He went before anyone knocked.”
“He always does,” Elinor said, crouching to give the cat what he had clearly decided he was owed.
Annabelle led Elinor to the drawing room. James returned to the library with Newton restored to his window seat, the ship book open at the plate of Cape St. Vincent.
“Honestly,” Elinor said, accepting tea. “Not the version you’ve been practicing for Lady Rosenhall.”
The prepared version dissolved. “It is manageable,” Annabelle said.
“James is wonderful. The music room has done more for him than I expected. Dominic tries. He doesn’t always know the method, but the intent is there.
” She looked at her hands. “He left the house today rather than stay in the room while James played. But he arranged the piano. He arranged the tuner. He found the right instrument, and had it gone over twice before we touched it.”
“He does it sideways,” Elinor said.
“Yes.” The word came out a little too quickly because it was exactly right. “He does everything sideways.”
Elinor was quiet in the way that meant she was processing, not done. “I’ve been speaking to Lucien,” she said. “Not pushing. Only reminding him what he already knows about Dominic, which is considerable, if you arrange it correctly.”
“I know.” Annabelle set down her cup. “Elinor. I need you to let us manage Lucien ourselves. I am deeply grateful, truly, but Dominic has to be the one to reach him. Lucien needs to see it come from Dominic, unassisted, and I think in some small way he is beginning to. If it’s arranged for him, it won’t hold. ”
Elinor looked at her steadily, then nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“He’ll come around,” Annabelle said. “He always does. He needs to decide it for himself.”
From the library: “Newton. Those pages are not a cushion.”
And Newton, by the evidence, continued to treat them as such.
James arrived at dinner with his cuffs slightly crooked, submitted to Mrs. Howell’s attention at the door with the patience of long practice, and arranged his cutlery before he sat.
“I played the second piece through,” he told Annabelle. “Without stopping.”
“Both times?”
“Both times. The third bar was better.” He picked up his spoon. “The rhythm held.”
Dominic came in and took his seat, coat still on. He looked at the three place settings—the candles, the laid cutlery, his wine glass already poured—and said nothing about any of it.
“James says the rhythm held today,” Annabelle said.
Dominic looked at the boy. “Both times?”
James glanced at him, a flicker of surprise at the echo of his own word. “Both times.”
“Good.” He reached for his wine. “The rhythm is the discipline. Get that and the rest follows.”
James set his spoon down. “Is that true for everything? Not only music?”
“Most things worth doing,” Dominic said.
After two minutes, his chin came up again. “Uncle Dominic. Do you think Newton knows the bird will come back?”
Dominic reached for his glass. “Cats generally have opinions on that sort of thing.”
“He has been in the same spot in the rose bushes for three days. That is not casual behavior.”
“No,” Dominic agreed. “That’s a commitment.”
“So he knows,” James said.
“Or he believes very firmly that he’s right, which in Newton’s case amounts to the same thing.”
James considered this. “People do that too,” he said. “Believe they’re right even when they can’t be certain.”
“They do,” Dominic said.
James looked at him and found whatever he was looking for. “I think Newton is right,” he said, and returned to his dinner.
It was not remarkable. It was a man and a boy talking about a cat over a bowl of soup, and it had asked nothing difficult of either of them.
Annabelle ate her dinner, noted the evidence quietly, and did not say anything about it to anyone.